Does President Bush resemble Adolf Hitler and Satan? That seemed to be the implication during the 9am half hour of CNN's American Morning. A protester wearing a George W. Bush mask, complete with a colored in Hitler-esque mustache and red horns attached to the forehead was deemed a Bush "look-alike" by reporter Susan Roesgen. In her report on how the bureaucracy at FEMA is delaying federal funds for rebuilding New Orleans, Roesgen highlighted a group of female Catholic school students demonstrating for money to repair the city's levees. The students, as Roesgen noted, "hoped the President would stop by" the protest. It was then that the demonstrator wearing the Bush mask was highlighted on camera, while Roesgen narrated, "But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." The "wad of cash" in the demonstrator's hand was actually several phony dollar bills mocking the Bush administration.

Susan Roesgen: "City officials aren’t the only ones wondering when federal money will materialize. Catholic school girls marched on Jackson Square. They and their teachers say more money is needed to fix the levees, and they hoped the President would stop by after his meeting with business leaders. But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." Real Player or Windows Media

A transcript of the full report follows below:

Miles O’Brien: "President Bush once again telling folks in New Orleans, hey, we’ve got your back, we’re here for you, we’ll help you rebuild. But our Susan Roesgen finds some city officials and residents are not happy. All the federal help, all that federal help in the way of greenbacks, not there."

Susan Roesgen: "When President Bush stood in New Orleans’ Jackson Square on September 15th, it was as if the cavalry had come to the rescue."

President George W. Bush: "We will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

Roesgen: "With that, New Orleanians assumed that however rough the future might be, at least the city would have the cash it needed to recover. But a top city official says the city is broke and hasn’t gotten any federal money for more than three months."

Greg Meffert, New Orleans, Chief Technology Officer: "You’re just kind of stunned in some of these meetings, because you’re like, well, wait a minute now, you know, you know the White House wants this. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know the mayor wants it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And even the, the governor’s saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, we’re working on it. Well, working on it doesn’t, doesn’t build me a police station."

Roesgen: "Greg Meffert blames FEMA bureaucracy for holding up $600 million the city needs to stay afloat."

Meffert: "They’re going to just do their thing. And I don’t care if there’s a thousand people waiting outside, or one person waiting outside, or a million. I go to form five and then I put this here in triplicate, and I move it over here. And this is what I do, and it’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years. And, you know, we be here before you came, and we’re–we be here after you came. And, you know, that’s the way it is."

Roesgen: "City officials aren’t the only ones wondering when federal money will materialize. Catholic school girls marched on Jackson Square. They and their teachers say more money is needed to fix the levees, and they hoped the President would stop by after his meeting with business leaders. But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not. Greg Meffert says he shared the city’s frustration with the President."

Meffert: "I’m frustrated on behalf of the city. And here’s the President of the United States, who’s frustrated that the money’s not going down. And you’re like, wait a minute, if the President agrees and the mayor agrees and everyone on camera’s agreeing, why is this money not moving?"

Roesgen: "FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews says, ‘Because these projects typically request millions of taxpayer dollars, there is paperwork involved to ensure that the funds will be spent appropriately. However, once the request is received, the average turnaround time for FEMA to fund public projects is 14.5 days.’ That’s just two weeks, but the city’s been waiting for it’s money for nearly four months."

Meffert: "After a while, you start to wonder, man, is this, is this the plan or something? You know? I mean, do you really want us to come back or not?"

“Unfortunately, when the Attorney General, as the highest law enforcement official in the country, does not vigorously pursue justice in cases where government clearly employed improper force, a cancerous suspicion metastasizes in the body of society with potentially devastating effects. Not least of all, it encourages dangerous extremists like those in the Oklahoma City bombing.”

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

AP

9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies -- including the CIA -- to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.

Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.

Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president's task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome. This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.

The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

Nor was there any legal reason compelling such disclosure. To be sure, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of these and other memoranda, but the government until now has successfully resisted such lawsuits. Even when the government disclosed that three members of al Qaeda had been subjected to waterboarding but that the technique was no longer part of the CIA interrogation program, the court sustained the government's argument that the precise details of how it was done, including limits and safeguards, could remain classified against the possibility that some future president may authorize its use. Therefore, notwithstanding the suggestion that disclosure was somehow legally compelled, there was no legal impediment to the Justice Department making the same argument even with respect to any techniques that remained in the CIA program until last January.

There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the claim that our interrogation of some unlawful combatants beyond the limits set in the Army Field Manual has disgraced us before the world. Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering. The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.

In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001. Such people, and many who purport to speak for world opinion, were resourceful both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in crafting reasons to resent America's role as a superpower. Recall also that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the punctiliously correct trials of defendants in connection with those incidents, and the bombing of the USS Cole took place long before the advent of CIA interrogations, the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the many other purported grievances asserted over the past eight years.

The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict. Those charged with the responsibility of gathering potentially lifesaving information from unwilling captives are now told essentially that any legal opinion they get as to the lawfulness of their activity is only as durable as political fashion permits. Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.

Beyond that, anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the OLC as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.

In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.

Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING in the comments section (found Here). As usual I have to put this warning up because a left leaning person has once again decided that strong language somehow makes a point more forcefully.

...I would say enjoy, but, only those who can quote Rise Against may like the video.

CAUTION, this video is full of “cards,” like, “for the children…”as well as misrepresentations about what the Constitution allows for, like Article II, Section 2, which was the most non-discussed item during the formation of the Constitution, so it was defined during the Civil War.And like it or not, this definition sticks.In other words, the President is Commander in Chief of the military; he has a Constitutional right to protect us from future events like 9/11.The Constitution, on the other hand, does not allow for private health-care for “the children.”(more about that at the end.)I can almost see Ron Paul and Chamberlin holding that piece of paper up and declaring, “this means peace in our time.”

Before watching the video… listen to this caller get the “smack down” by Medved.So when you hear numbers being thrown around… these same numbers were thrown around at Reagan's feet constantly.No more Berlin wall, and hopefully, a change in Islamo-Fascism to a more moderate view. Reagan could have failed, Bush may… time will tell… this in no ways means that Reagan – if he failed – would have not been right in what he was trying to do, just like Bush – if he fails – was not right in what he did.

This video is full of mistruths, misconceptions, and conspiracy theories.I post it here because a reader mentioned it, but I doubt he will be able to pick a subject out of it and defend it.A few years back many would tell me that “Bush stole the election.”In fact, this is what a visual arts teacher told my son and his classmates in the classroom setting, even mentioning Jeb Bush and the disenfranchisement of black voters (the teacher is obviously a Michael Moore fan), So I wrote a letter to the teacher and the principle, and guess what, the teacher couldn’t back her position and neither could all the people who told me the same thing.Come on folks, use your heads!

What W. did was when a call comes into our country from another country from a number that is a possible terror link (like the numbers taken from the computer of the guy who planned 9/11), or visa-versa, when a number is called from this country to another country and either person is on a watch list, then those calls should and could be monitored.

The girl holding the sign about an illegal war has no clue as to the legality of resuming the war with Saddam.It wasn’t a pre-emptive war, it was resumptive.I debated a professor from Michigan U who died on this hill.A U.N. treaty/cease-fire was brokered between Iraq and the United States/and he allies which made mention that if Saddam didn’t disarm in a short amount of time, we could legally resume the war.The fact alone that our fighter pilots were fired upon almost daily in the “no-fly zone” was reason enough, legally, to resume the war, let alone the other reasons mentioned above already in a link.

No money for kids…Why would a Ron Paul guy show this video???Ron Paul wants to shut down all social programs (yes, socialized health-care would be gone forever).Welfare is gone with Ron Paul, let alone some health bill that demands private insurance companies to insure kids.This is where my commentary has to stop.My fellow politico at work says this all-the-time.He cannot understand why Liberals and Democrats want Ron Paul, he is a strict Libertarian… every Dept., except maybe for five mentioned in the Articles of Confederation, would be on his list to shut down.This video complains about something that would not even come to Ron Paul’s desk if Ron Paul had his way!?If it did, he would veto it as well. Oh, so frustrating.

For thousands of Americans, Tax Day was a moment to protest what they see as bloated budgets and a pile of debt being passed on to their children.

For CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use the word "teabagging" in a sentence.

Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.

So when the anti-tax "tea party" protests were held Wednesday across the country, cable anchors and guests -- who for weeks had all but ignored the story -- covered the protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interspersed "teabagging" references with analyst David Gergen's more staid commentary on how Republicans are still "searching for their voice."

MSNBC's David Shuster weaved a tapestry of "Animal House" humor Monday as he filled in for Countdown host Keith Olbermann.

The protests, he explained, amount to "Teabagging day for the right wing and they are going nuts for it."

He described the parties as simultaneously "full-throated" and "toothless," and continued: "They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending." Shuster also noted how the protesters "whipped out" the demonstrations this past weekend.

Click here to join a discussion on teabagging.

Tea Party participants were not amused. The events were held in dozens of cities across the country, and while some demonstrators were criticized for wielding off-topic and sometimes insensitive protest signs, most took to the streets to speak out against government spending.

Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the media coverage was "insulting," reacting specifically to CNN reporter Susan Roesgen's combative interviews with Illinois demonstrators in which she declared that the protests were "anti-CNN" and supported by FOX News. She left the teabagging jokes to her colleagues, though.

"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."

Max Pappas, public policy vice president at FreedomWorks -- a small-government group which promoted the tea parties -- said it's a "shame" media outlets cracked jokes at a genuine "grassroots uprising."

"I think what that reveals is how worried they are that this might actually be something serious. You make fun of things you're afraid of, I'd say," Pappas said.

If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.

By one count, the two of them used the word "teabag" more than 50 times on one show. And on Monday, Cox even let the viewers in on their joke -- referencing Urbandictionary.com, a site which offers a number of colorful definitions for the term "teabagging."

"Well, there is a lot of love in teabagging," Cox said. "It is curious, though, as you point out, they do not use the verb 'teabag.' It might be because they're less enthusiastic about teabagging than some of the more corporate conservatives who seem to have taken to it quite easily."

Jenny Beth Martin, a Republican activist who helped organize one protest in Atlanta, said she's not too worried about the protests being dismissed by some media outlets. She estimated 750,000 people attended more than 800 protests in all 50 states, and that at the very least the local media and community newspapers documented it.

Does President Bush resemble Adolf Hitler and Satan? That seemed to be the implication during the 9am half hour of CNN's American Morning. A protester wearing a George W. Bush mask, complete with a colored in Hitler-esque mustache and red horns attached to the forehead was deemed a Bush "look-alike" by reporter Susan Roesgen. In her report on how the bureaucracy at FEMA is delaying federal funds for rebuilding New Orleans, Roesgen highlighted a group of female Catholic school students demonstrating for money to repair the city's levees. The students, as Roesgen noted, "hoped the President would stop by" the protest. It was then that the demonstrator wearing the Bush mask was highlighted on camera, while Roesgen narrated, "But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." The "wad of cash" in the demonstrator's hand was actually several phony dollar bills mocking the Bush administration.

Susan Roesgen: "City officials aren’t the only ones wondering when federal money will materialize. Catholic school girls marched on Jackson Square. They and their teachers say more money is needed to fix the levees, and they hoped the President would stop by after his meeting with business leaders. But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." Real Player or Windows Media

A transcript of the full report follows below:

Miles O’Brien: "President Bush once again telling folks in New Orleans, hey, we’ve got your back, we’re here for you, we’ll help you rebuild. But our Susan Roesgen finds some city officials and residents are not happy. All the federal help, all that federal help in the way of greenbacks, not there."

Susan Roesgen: "When President Bush stood in New Orleans’ Jackson Square on September 15th, it was as if the cavalry had come to the rescue."

President George W. Bush: "We will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

Roesgen: "With that, New Orleanians assumed that however rough the future might be, at least the city would have the cash it needed to recover. But a top city official says the city is broke and hasn’t gotten any federal money for more than three months."

Greg Meffert, New Orleans, Chief Technology Officer: "You’re just kind of stunned in some of these meetings, because you’re like, well, wait a minute now, you know, you know the White House wants this. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know the mayor wants it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And even the, the governor’s saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, we’re working on it. Well, working on it doesn’t, doesn’t build me a police station."

Roesgen: "Greg Meffert blames FEMA bureaucracy for holding up $600 million the city needs to stay afloat."

Meffert: "They’re going to just do their thing. And I don’t care if there’s a thousand people waiting outside, or one person waiting outside, or a million. I go to form five and then I put this here in triplicate, and I move it over here. And this is what I do, and it’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years. And, you know, we be here before you came, and we’re–we be here after you came. And, you know, that’s the way it is."

Roesgen: "City officials aren’t the only ones wondering when federal money will materialize. Catholic school girls marched on Jackson Square. They and their teachers say more money is needed to fix the levees, and they hoped the President would stop by after his meeting with business leaders. But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not. Greg Meffert says he shared the city’s frustration with the President."

Meffert: "I’m frustrated on behalf of the city. And here’s the President of the United States, who’s frustrated that the money’s not going down. And you’re like, wait a minute, if the President agrees and the mayor agrees and everyone on camera’s agreeing, why is this money not moving?"

Roesgen: "FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews says, ‘Because these projects typically request millions of taxpayer dollars, there is paperwork involved to ensure that the funds will be spent appropriately. However, once the request is received, the average turnaround time for FEMA to fund public projects is 14.5 days.’ That’s just two weeks, but the city’s been waiting for it’s money for nearly four months."

Meffert: "After a while, you start to wonder, man, is this, is this the plan or something? You know? I mean, do you really want us to come back or not?"